Was Handel gay? / Musicologist's provocative new book explains why it might matter

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, February 17, 2002

He spent years in Italian courts and English country estates where homosexuality was known to predominate (even if the word didn't exist yet). He was notable even in his own lifetime for the fierceness with which he guarded his privacy. There is no evidence he ever had a romantic attachment with a woman.

Could George Frideric Handel have been gay? And if so, what, if anything, would that tell us about the music he wrote?

These questions -- equally challenging in their respective ways -- have been around for a while, generally at the fringes of musical scholarship. Now they have been raised with fresh urgency by a provocative new book, "Handel as Orpheus," released last month by Harvard University Press.

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In a sober and densely scholarly study, Massachusetts Institute of Technology musicologist Ellen T. Harris analyzes Handel's chamber cantatas, more than 100 dramatic works written mostly during his formative years as a young composer in Italy.

These short pieces -- each one typically consisting of a handful of arias and recitatives for one or two voices with simple accompaniment -- were written to librettos on pastoral and mythological themes for private performance among close-knit circles of aristocratic friends. They represent the last great cache of unknown Handelian music, and Harris doesn't merely document their existence -- she uses them to explore the role of sexuality in dramatic music, and to challenge the way we think about the biographies of great artists.

One of the things that makes Handel's private life so tantalizing is how very private it was. Despite spending nearly his entire career as a celebrity in London -- a city whose love of gossip was every bit as developed in the 18th century as it is today -- he left no solid indication that he ever had a love affair of any kind, gay or straight.

QUESTIONS IN HIS OWN DAY

The question of his sexual life, in fact, inspired curiosity and interest even in his own day. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that King George II asked him flat out about his "love of women," to which Handel replied evasively that he had no time for anything but music.

One rumor, dating back to his first biographer, has him romantically linked to an older married singer nicknamed "La Bombace" ("The Bombshell"). But none of it is supported by any credible evidence.

Ever since then, Handel biographers have had to resort to a certain amount of strenuous huffing and puffing to avoid the worrisome possibility that there might have been something, you know, funny about his love life.

Some have offered pious maunderings about his supposed exalted spirituality,

suggesting with utmost seriousness that he was simply too unearthly to think about sex (this about a composer whose love of other earthly pleasures, including food, drink and bawdy humor in several languages, was attested and legendary). Others have invented human girlfriends, blowing up the Bombace story, for instance, into a full-blown putative affair.

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

Of course, there is no concrete evidence of Handel's having engaged in homosexual activity. But as Harris makes clear, there is enough circumstantial evidence to justify those biographers in feeling nervous.

The Italian and German courts in which Handel served during his early 20s were populated by princes and cardinals whose homosexuality was an open secret.

During his London years, too, many of his closest friends and patrons were drawn from social circles known to be gay.

None of this is conclusive, of course, nor does Harris claim it is. But it is certainly enough to warrant re-examining the old myths -- based primarily on wishful thinking -- of Handel as either a chaste seraph or a secret ladies' man.

Still, the more pressing question remains: Even if Handel were gay, would that be an important development in our understanding of him as an artist?

This question is raised every time a scholar tries to suggest a gay aspect to some musician's private life -- most recently, for example, in connection with Schubert and Ravel. It isn't a groundless question, but there is something disingenuous about the indignation that always accompanies it.

Where, after all, is the outrage over music historians' interest in deducing the identity of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved," or charting Wagner's extramarital affairs, or documenting Janacek's middle-aged obsession with a younger woman?

As long as the musicians in question are straight, their personal lives are presumed to be of interest to posterity. It is only when homosexuality enters the picture that "don't ask, don't tell" goes into effect, and the privacy of long-dead artists suddenly becomes paramount in some quarters.

Yet it's true that without a concrete link to the music, biographical speculations remain essentially gossip (with all the deep-rooted pleasures and ambivalence that that entails). The real importance of Harris' study is that she uses the gay environment in which Handel moved -- whether or not he participated in its sexual activities -- to illuminate the music he wrote during the Italian period and later.

Through far-reaching comparisons with literature and the visual arts, she unravels the elaborate coded references to homosexuality embedded in the cantatas -- references that Handel's educated audience would surely have caught. Orpheus, for instance, to whom the young Handel was often compared, was often treated in classical antiquity not only as the patron of music but as the embodiment of erotic love between men.

She illuminates the differences between Handel's writing for male and female characters, and shows how musical details can often support a same-sex interpretation of a work whose libretto is ambiguous.

And although the chamber cantatas are never likely to loom very large in the modern performance repertoire, their importance extends to Handel's operas,

which loom larger every day.

It was writing the cantatas that taught the young Handel how to create character through music, to give life to a poetic text, to shape and vary a vocal melody. He kept these scores with him for the rest of his life, sometimes reusing material from them at dramatically analogous junctures in his operas.

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It's possible, in other words, to trace a direct link between the gay milieus of the Roman, Florentine and Hanoverian courts where Handel learned his craft and the mature dramatic music of his later years, operas and oratorios alike.

What Handel did behind closed doors, and with whom, will never be known with any certainty. But the forces that shaped his artistry are more important in any case.

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